Slim Waterproof Sharp AQUOS Pad SH-06F Announced

A new extremely light, small, and waterproof 7-inch Android 4.4 tablet was announced yesterday, with the Sharp AQUOS Pad SH-06F making its public appearance.

It’s not often we see something significantly new in the design on tablets, but we do on this one. As you can see by the pictures, Sharp has cut away most of the regular bezel on the sides and top of the tablet, thus making the actual tablet around 20-15 mm shorter than an average 7-inch tablet. It’s just 17.5 cm on the longest side.

So it’s certainly smaller, and it will be interesting to see how other tablet brands respond to this. Samsung have also cut away a little of the bezel on the sides of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab S tablets.

Sharp AQUOS Pad SH-06F

At 8.8 mm in thickness, this tablet is a little chubby compared to other high-end tablets, so this seems to be where Sharp had to compensate.

The Sharp AQUOS Pad SH-06F is also very light, at just 233 gram. By comparison, Google Nexus 7 FHD weighs 290 gram, while Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7 weighs 303 gram. This is now by far the lightest 7-inch tablet on the market.

And waterproof. Sony and Sharp like their Android tablets to be waterproof, so now we have a tiny 7-inch consumer oriented Android tablet that’s IPX5 waterproof too.

As for all the other hardware specifications, they point to a high-end 7-inch tablet. The screen is a IGZO LCD display with Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1200 (WUXGA). And it has a 2MP front camera and a 8MP rear camera.

The processor is a 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (second gen. MSM8974AB), and it has 2GB of RAM, in addition to 32GB storage + 64GB microSD expansion support. The battery capacity stands at 4200mAh.

The Sharp AQUOS Pad SH-06F will be released in June in Japan, but it’s not very likely to be released in the US at any point. And it is a little bit of a shame to not have this tablet option, but people can always try to import one themselves if they want one.